A Violet Season (27 page)

And then she wondered: did he even see it that way? Did he love her enough to think of her as a person with her own feelings, capable of being betrayed? Or had he seen her all along as a mere object in his life, a tool to be used for an express purpose: a hoe for weeding, a shovel for digging, a wife for cooking and cleaning and bearing children. If that were true, he was capable of doing anything to her.

On the sixth evening after her return from the city, when Frank went out to check the greenhouses before bed, Ida gathered Oliver and Reuben at the kitchen table to tell them she was leaving and taking Reuben with her. She had spent many of her sleepless hours thinking through this conversation as well, wondering how she could impress upon her boys the seriousness of what their father had done without telling them what it was.

Oliver surprised her, as he often had this past year, by taking the news like his own man. “I know something’s not right, Ma,” he said. “But what will happen to him?”

She told him the truth: “I don’t know.”

“I want to stay with Pa!” Reuben protested.

“Your father may not be staying here,” Ida said. “Uncle William and Uncle Harold have called in his debt. It’s likely he’ll lose this house, maybe even his job.”

“This is our farm, too,” Reuben said. Oliver cracked his knuckles
one by one as he thought. Ida cringed at the sound but did not criticize. She watched Reuben watching Oliver and was exhausted by the prospect of having to convince him, too.

“Reuben can come with me,” Oliver said finally. “I’m of age.”

Ida moved to take Reuben’s hand, but he pulled away from her. “I’m not going with you,” he said. She felt so fragile that she feared another word from either of them would crack her open. She wanted desperately to take Reuben in her arms, but he wouldn’t have it. What if he were to stay with Frank? It was an option she couldn’t abide. She had already made one terrible mistake. She could not afford to make another.

“I’ll help him find work for the summer,” Oliver said. “And he’ll finish school.”

“No,” Ida said firmly. How could she compel Reuben to come with her? He was fourteen, taller and stronger than she, and of all her children, the most stubborn. “I won’t allow it, and you must back me up on that, Oliver.”

Though he leaned toward her to object, he must have seen something in her face, for he stood tall again and took Reuben’s shoulders. “You go with Ma,” he said.

“No! I won’t. I want to come with you.”

“You’ll be in the way,” Oliver said. “I’ll have a business to run, and I can’t have a little kid underfoot.”

“I can work, too!”

“You must finish school,” Ida said, and Oliver nodded. She felt so grateful to him, her young man, that she feared she might cry.

Reuben wrenched from Oliver’s grip and ran out the door, slamming it so hard that the latch failed to catch and the door bounced open to the night.

Oliver opened his arms. He was taller than Ida by a foot now, and her head fit under his chin. He held her as if he were the father and she the child. “He’ll be all right,” he said. “I’ll go talk to him.”

*   *   *   

Ida lay sleepless beside Frank that night, waiting for him to be still. Ana awoke demanding to be fed, though at times she had slept through the night, and Frank stirred and muttered at the interruption. In half an hour the baby slumbered again, but Ida waited longer still to be certain Frank was asleep. Well past midnight, she pulled on her shoes and shawl over her nightdress and began hauling her goods out of the cellar, stacking them first in the garden and then in the wagon, which was parked in the barn. The task took her a long hour, during which she feared Frank or the baby would awaken, but when she finally slipped into bed, they were still asleep.

She lay alert, awaiting the hour when she would have to tell him she was leaving, wondering how she would ever manage to harness the horses and gather the children and drive into town to get Alice once he knew. Again she considered sneaking away. As the room’s nighttime shadows shifted with the light of the traveling moon, Ida feared that these might be her last living hours, for she could imagine the worst in his response.

Frank slept fitfully himself and rose well before dawn, dressing quietly to avoid waking her. She heard him cut a slice of bread at the counter before the front door latch clicked. Then she leaned over to check on the baby and Jasper before dressing.

The dark spring morning was frosty, and Ida saw no sign of the lantern Frank would be carrying. No doubt he had headed over the ridge to check on the greenhouses again. He often went out to check them as if to keep them safe from some imagined disaster. She relied on the gibbous moon to guide her up to the ridge, and on the other side, she spotted his light, floating ghostlike down the center of greenhouse 24. It stopped and swung in place like a pendulum with no clock. She made out the shadow of his figure ducking to check something, then standing slowly with his hand
pressed hard on his back, which must be paining him again. There was nothing in the houses to check, for the cuttings were all taking root in their raised beds outside, and the old soil had been shoveled from the beds. She saw he was wandering in search of a purpose. The gesture filled her with sadness, and she allowed it to sit with her a moment before she approached him.

The door to the greenhouse was ajar. Ida stepped through the packing room and down three steps to the dirt floor and said, “Frank.”

His shoulders jumped, then he lowered his head to study something he held in his cupped hands—a dead starling, she saw as she moved closer. Or perhaps not quite dead, for Frank was alternately blowing gently at its yellow beak and whistling at it, a starling whistle, attempting to rouse the bird from its stupor. One of its shiny green wings ticked, but Ida couldn’t tell whether it was Frank’s breath or the starling making the movement. Sometimes they flew in through the open roof panels or crashed against the glass in confusion. Ida wasn’t sorry to see a starling meet its end—they were a curse to her garden, always stealing her berries and fighting with the other birds. Ignoring her, Frank carried the dying bird all the way out the far end of the house, where he stooped to lay it in the grass. She waited for him as he ambled up the long center aisle toward her in the dark. No one else was there to witness—not another human, nor a bird, nor even a sweet-faced flower. Clods of dirt and cobwebs clung to the empty wooden beds, as if the entire crop had been stolen.

When he got close enough to be heard without raising his voice, Frank said, “What are you doing up here?”

“It’s the only place I can speak to you privately,” she said. A draft of night air brushed her back, and she shivered.

“You should be down in the house with the boys.”

“They’re all asleep.”

“What do you want, Ida?” he said, his tone brittle, and she saw
that he feared she knew everything. She didn’t want to corner him like a possum in the dark. She didn’t want to force him to lash out.

“Will you walk with me?”

“I’m checking the cuttings.”

“They’re fine, Frank.”

“Don’t you speak to me that way. Don’t you patronize me.” Spittle fell in the light as he spat out the P.

“All right,” she said, using the calmest voice she could muster, and she walked slowly toward the door, watching his reflection in the glass, her heart pounding for fear he would jump on her and kill her. She reached the door and stepped up into the packing room, losing the benefit of his reflection, then through the room and out onto the grass, where she took deliberately slow steps toward the ridge. The shadows swung dizzily around her as he carried the lantern, and she stood looking over the farm and waited for him to catch up.

“I’m leaving this morning,” she said when he was beside her. “I’m taking Alice and Reuben and the little ones with me. Oliver will stay.”

Frank swung the lantern like a scythe and took five or six long steps down the hill. Then he stopped and shouted, “My sons have a right to this farm!” He might as well have whispered, for all the response the night gave him. She knew he was speaking not to her, not even to his brothers, but to an unjust world. From here, below the ridge, they could see the pointed turrets of William’s Queen Anne house poking into the black sky as if to punch holes of brightness through it. A light was on in the kitchen. Ida searched for the lights of Harold’s farmhouse down the hill and across the lane, a house of three daughters.

“It’s not just,” Ida said quietly. She tried to think how to get Frank to move on down the hill without touching him. She didn’t want to be standing with him up here in the dark.

“I don’t care what they do to me,” Frank said. “But my sons deserve what’s due them.”

“And your daughter,” Ida said. She felt tall as a late-day shadow thrown on the sky, stretching earth to heaven above it all. She felt the heft of justice behind her. Then she feared she would lose her footing and fall, for she remembered her own stupidity, the terrible error she had made in believing, without thinking, that Frank had equal concern for the welfare of all his children. A man who had that could be trusted to do what was right. But a man who cared only for the future of his sons was a danger to his daughters.

“I know what you did to Alice,” Ida said. Let him kill her right here where she stood. If he was so righteous, let him kill her right here in the sight of God’s stars. “I know where the babies came from, too,” she continued. “I never believed you were capable of such a thing.”

Frank snorted and kicked the earth.

“Factory work would have been bad enough,” she said. “I’m not sure I could have forgiven you even that. But the devil must be in you to have done such a thing to your daughter.”

“Factory work!” Frank shouted, then made a huffing sound like a laugh. A steely desire for vengeance flashed in Ida’s hands, and she pulled her shawl tight to keep them close. “Multiply that by five, Ida. Twenty-five dollars a week or more! That’s what she could have made if she’d tried. She could have saved us. But I
never
forced her to do a thing.” He jabbed his finger at her, emphasizing his innocence.

“And what about her mail?” Ida asked. “You gave me a false address.”

“I didn’t want anyone interfering.”

“Anyone? I’m not just anyone! And by God, you’re right. I would have interfered if only I had been wise enough to see what was happening.” Unable to contain her hands any longer, she grabbed at his shirtsleeve and shook his arm, but he didn’t flinch. “What happened to Mary?” she demanded, for she must have it all, though she was terrified of the answer.

“A family on Madison Avenue paid me two hundred dollars for her,” Frank said. “Two hundred dollars, Ida!” He was almost gleeful, and she could see that something in him had slipped. Of course. It had slipped long ago, but only now could she see it on the surface, in the jagged way he spun and tromped down the hill. As he neared the yard, he snuffed the lantern.

She stood halfway up the hill and watched him set the hot lantern on the stoop and then, without entering the house, veer toward the barn. A suggestion of daylight lay in the east, and birds had begun to chatter. The white blossoms of the abandoned pear trees shone in the moonlight. Ida stood for a time watching her house, waiting for something to happen. Frank was still in the barn when she reached the house and took the lantern in. She sat in her rocker, awaiting sunup before waking the children. She was too fearful to sleep, but as the time passed in quiet, she began to trust the stillness. Frank didn’t come in the house, and when she went to harness the horses before waking Jasper and the baby, she found that Trip was gone, and so was the money behind the woodbox.

F
rank’s departure delayed Ida’s plans, for now she had only one horse, not strong enough to pull the wagonload alone. The situation brought her the following evening to William’s door. Standing in his front hallway, both of them unsure of how to proceed in these circumstances, Ida and William negotiated to exchange the heifer and her calf, eight of the hens and the rooster, and the chaise for one of the old work teams to drive Ida’s wagon. Oliver could keep four of the hens, the old milk cow, and Trip’s mate, Trudy, as well as whatever was left in the house. Then Ida told Oliver where Alice was staying and sent him into town to collect her.

While he was gone and Ida was putting the children to bed, there was a knock at the door. “Ma, it’s Aunt Frances,” Reuben called from the kitchen.

Frances had not been to the tenant house since Ida’s bout with mastitis. Before that, Ida couldn’t recall what would have brought her down here. Jasper’s birth? As she tucked the covers around Jasper and sang him to sleep, Ida imagined the additional demands that might be made. What accounts did the women have to settle among themselves? Whatever they were, they would have to wait.

With Jasper drifting off and Ana asleep, Ida stood to face her
next trial. She found Frances sitting at the kitchen table across from Reuben, who was reading with more industry than Ida had ever seen. Frances faced him, hands folded on the table, rubbing her thumbs together nervously.

“Evening, Frances,” Ida said, and Frances stood to greet her. “Reuben, go upstairs to read, please,” Ida said. “You may take the lantern with you.”

The removal of the light made it difficult for Ida to read the expression on Frances’s face.

“I came to say good-bye,” Frances said after a time.

“Thank you,” Ida said. A good-bye didn’t require this formal audience at the kitchen table.

“I’ve always known about the debt. You know I keep the books. And I want my boy to have a good start. We all do, don’t we.” Ida made no move to acknowledge this. “But I don’t see the need to drive a man past his limits for the sake of money,” Frances continued. “Or really, for the sake of revenge. It isn’t right, and I understand that. Even if my husband doesn’t.”

Ida gave her the kind of slight nod she might give a distant acquaintance on the street. Frances seemed to be waiting for Ida to say something in response, but Ida had nothing to say.